Twitter getting boost from new Apple iOS

Twitter is seeing a big bump in membership because of its new integration with Apple’s mobile operating system, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said.

Apple’s upgraded iOS 5 was released last Thursday and is available to iPhone and iPad owners, including the 4 million who bought the new iPhone 4S in just the first weekend. And the operating system has Twitter built into apps such as photos so users don’t have to launch a separate application.

So Twitter signups coming from Apple mobile devices have increased three fold since the launch of iOS 5, Costolo said during a discussion Monday night at the Web 2.0 Summit.

“The iOS integration is going to be absolutely huge for us,” Costolo said. “We looked at the chart after the first day, and we anticipated it was going to be big. This integration is so native and so frictionless that we think it’s going to be even better than we thought it was.”

Costolo said Apple has also become a “corporate mentor” to Twitter, which is trying to offer “simplicity in a world of complexity.”

“We’re trying to edit the product down and simplify it and not just layer things in, and Apple thinks about things the same way,” he said.

Costolo also said one of Twitter’s biggest challenges is helping people find relevant content from the stream of 250 million tweets a day, or “separating the signal from the noise.”

“We need to be able to surface that content so that people who are coming to the system for the first time can discover what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in their world,” he said.

Another challenge is to make money from the tweets, but Costolo said he doesn’t lose sleep over the effectiveness of Twitter’s current ad programs, such as Promoted Tweets.

But Twitter may look at introducing some form of ads that include rich media. That doesn’t mean suddenly there will be big embedded movie ads in the stream, but “we will see how people interact with the rich content and decide how to go from there,” Costolo said. “We will do things that resonate with the users.”

In answering a question from the audience, Costolo said the company might consider some sort of “nuanced” revenue sharing opportunities with content producers and distributors, although he wasn’t too specific.

But that doesn’t include a “pay-per-tweet” plan, he said. “We’re not going to go down that path.”